Setup program

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The final v1.7 was included with Doom 1.9. The color scheme changed between versions.

The DOS version of Doom (vanilla Doom) included a setup program to allow the user to configure the game before running it. This was necessary because under DOS, programs needed the hardware settings to use to access devices such as the sound card and controllers. The setup program was included in Doom distributions as a file named "SETUP.EXE". Later games based on Doom, including Hexen and Strife, also included versions of the setup program.

The setup program appears to have been derived from the setup program written for Raptor: Call of the Shadows; early versions even attribute copyright to Raptor developer Cygnus Studios. While SETUP.EXE was written in C, the menus themselves were designed using a shareware program called "The Laughing Dog Screen Maker" by Yardbird Software.

The source code to SETUP.EXE was released in 1996 by John Carmack, long before the release of the Doom source itself. In 2005, Simon "Fraggle" Howard contacted John Carmack, who agreed to relicensing of the source code under the GNU GPL.

Contents

Romero's "funky" blue (#041440) that he programmed into the setup program.

The setup program runs in DOS 80x25 text mode, with a blue color scheme. However, the color scheme changed between v1.5 and v1.7 (the versions of SETUP.EXE distributed with Doom 1.7a and Doom 1.8). The source code to the setup program shows that the earlier versions changed the EGA palette to make the blue a darker, "funky" shade, but this code was disabled in later versions, which used the brighter blue that is in the default EGA palette.

The older versions included help text for the currently selected item, displayed in the line at the bottom of the screen. The later version did not include this feature.

Older versions of the setup tool displayed help text for the currently selected item at the bottom of the screen. In the mouse configuration menu, the "Fire" and "Move Forward" items were mistakenly labelled with the help text "Fire main weapons" and "Fire special weapons the[sic] you pickup/buy". Doom never included "special weapons" or the ability to buy weapons, these messages are apparently left over from the fact that the Doom setup program appears to have been derived from the setup program for Raptor: Call of the Shadows.

Later versions of Heretic and Hexen removed the ability to launch multiplayer games using the setup program, instructing the user to use DeathManager! instead.